


the devil won't let me be

by amosanguis



Series: creature AUs [63]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff and Angst, Highlander Immortals, M/M, POV Alternating, Post-Episode: s04e19 Ku I Ka Pili Koko (Blood Brothers), bit of a road trip fic, getting blown up all the time takes a toll, title from a song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 17:00:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17729210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amosanguis/pseuds/amosanguis
Summary: Steve and Danny (unknowingly) meet their first death under the parking garage.





	the devil won't let me be

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Sinister Kid" by The Black Keys

-z-

 

Danny’s wound heals in three days.

Three days.

Three days and the gaping wound where he’d been impaled by a piece of rebar was now just an ugly mess of scar tissue that may or may not be getting less ugly by the hour.

 

-

 

When Danny goes to pick Steve up, he nearly crashes at the feeling of static building at the base of his skull and only releasing as soon as he sees Steve – the man himself stumbling out of his house as if he were being chased.

“What the fuck?” Danny asks, grabbing Steve by his bicep and pulling him back into his house. Steve turns to fully face him and Danny sees it then – sees that Steve’s face is completely clear. No scratches, no bruising.

“I don’t know,” Steve is saying, voice quiet as Danny grabs him by face and pulls him down – and Steve knows exactly what Danny is looking at.

Then Danny is pulling back and he’s lifting up his shirt and Steve can’t help but reach out and touch – brushing his fingers over the light pink scar.

 

-

 

So, they can sense each other now.

That’s a thing that– Danny sighs, rubs his hands over his face before looking up from the tech table to the doors he knows, _knows_ Steve will be walking through in three, two, –

There he was.

Steve meets Danny’s eyes and he releases a shaky breath and rubs at the back of his neck.

 

-

 

“You on some new medications or something?” Chin asks, cocking his head at the thin scab – all that remained of being grazed by a bullet just the day before. “That’s healed quick, brah.”

Danny shoots Chin a sardonic smile, says, “No, it just wasn’t as bad as everyone made it out to be. You,” Danny waves his hand at Chin, then over at Steve and Kono, “you, all of you, you get too worried about little ol’ me. Really, guys, it’s embarrassing.”

Chin just rolls his eyes as he says something about being _ohana_ that Danny doesn’t really hear over the way Steve’s looking at him.

 

-

 

Danny thinks he and Steve are starting to put it together – they’re starting to think that maybe they hadn’t survived the explosion. There’d been a lot of blood, more than what could’ve been explained by the rebar in Danny’s side and the abrasions on Steve’s face. Most of the blood had been covered by the dust and dirt, the rest was explained away as the other guy’s.

And all that any of this means is that they’re still no closer to figuring out what any of this means.

 

-x-

 

Steve screams.

He’s cradling Danny’s head in his lap and he’s screaming and there’s blood just fuckin’ _everywhere_ and Danny doesn’t have a pulse—

—and then he does.

—and then Danny gasps and his eyes fly open and he’s sucking in huge gulps of air like he’s a man near-drowned and Steve can’t stop saying his name.

 

-

 

They run into others, others that they can sense the way they can sense each other, but none of them stick around. Most take one look at them before running in the opposite direction and disappearing. And Steve and Danny have more than enough experience in hunting down those who don’t want to be found – but in this, with these others, they have no luck and there are never any second chances.

 

-

 

Wo Fat puts a bullet between his eyes the same time Steve puts one between Wo Fat’s. The only difference is that Steve wakes up from it – and just in time, too, gasping back to life just as Danny and the others are kicking down the door.

Later, after Steve’s recovered enough of himself, put his memories back into the right order, and he’s sitting on the couch with a Longboard in his hand, he watches as Danny puts his hands onto Steve’s thighs and kneels in front of him.

“I couldn’t,” Danny says, choking on the words he wants to say, “I couldn’t feel you. I knew you were there in that building but I just— _Steve_ , I couldn’t _feel_ you. I thought, ‘this is it. We’ve finally run out of time. We’ve finally run out of chances’.”

Steve knows that feeling – or, he thinks, he thinks he knows that feeling. He remembers it from when he’d thought Danny had died (the second time, not the first time; neither of them remembers that first time). Steve wants to say something, anything, to chase the tears building in Danny’s eyes – but Danny’s hands are burning against his thighs, he’s gripping Steve tight as if to keep him in place. So Steve doesn’t say anything – instead he leans forward and pushes his lips against Danny’s.

Danny groans into the kiss, one of his hands moving from Steve’s thigh to the back of Steve’s neck, his fingers curling into Steve’s hair.

“You can’t do that,” Danny is saying, rising just enough to stand before crawling onto Steve’s lap, “you can’t leave me here. I can’t be on this island and not _feel_ you, Steve, do you understand me?”

Danny’s voice is desperate, bordering on manic.

It’s all Steve can do to nod his head and say, “Anything, Danno, whatever you want, I swear,” before he deepens their kiss and pushes Danny into the cushions. He’s too banged up to do what he wants to with Danny, his mind still too much of a jumble – but they still curl around each other, kissing until they’re sloppy from the exhaustion and adrenaline of the day.

 

-

 

Then the morning dawns – bright and slow, and Steve looks down at himself.

It was a strange feeling – knowing that he’d been hurt, knowing that he’d been _dead_ – and yet all evidence of it had disappeared with his resurrection.

Neither he nor Danny had any explanation; and they hadn’t dared to ask any questions. Time, they figured, was looking more and more like the only thing they had on their side.

 

-x-

 

One year passes into another that passes into five.

Gracie’s graduated high school and she’s being actively courted by colleges across the nation and Danny – god, Danny is _tired_.

There’s barely a face on the team or around HPD that Danny recognizes anymore, and this is the umpteenth time he and Steve have been blown up in the middle of the sea.

“What if we don’t let them find us?” Danny asks, crawling up onto a piece of driftwood.

“What’re you thinking?” Steve asks.

Danny unhooks his badge and he meets Steve’s eyes as he lets it slip from his fingers and into the ocean deep.

 

-

 

They’re picked up by a cargo ship, the captain of which doesn’t ask any questions, just continues on his way to Singapore.

 

-

 

The only people who could have found them were dead or knew better than to look.

 

-

 

They stay on the cargo ship, working under the captain who’s still not asking questions. The crew follows his lead – asking only what they’d like to be called. Danny says _Max_ , Steve says _Lou_ and they force themselves to say the appropriated names to each other over and over until it’s natural, until there’s no chance of a slip up.

It’s quiet on the ship; peaceful, even, and Danny sleeps like a baby, Steve’s arm wrapped around his waist, their legs intertwined on their shared bunk.

One of the crew, a large man named Asim, had tried to give them shit once.

Danny had made Asim swallow his teeth (literally).

 

-

 

He checks in on Gracie as quietly as he can – using a fake account he’d set up years ago when she’d made her first social media post. He wonders if she’d ever figured out it was him, if she’s ever gone through her followers/following and wondered at the account without any posts, the one whose profile is a picture of a simple stuffed monkey.

He doesn’t have to wonder anymore when, after three months out at sea, the cargo ship pulls in and he and Steve get themselves to a computer and he sees that the account, the one that pointedly never interacts with any of Gracie’s posts, has been sent a long string of heart emojis on Danny’s birthday.

Danny wants to react, wants to say anything back – anything at all – but he doesn’t know if they’re still being looked for, if that’s something that’ll ever stop or if they’ve just been thought dead. But he knows that she’ll see he’s read the message – and all he can do is hope that she understands.

They next time they check, there’s another string of emojis sent to the account on Steve’s birthday.

It’s the closest Danny’s seen Steve come to crying in a long, long time.

Danny will unashamedly admit to shedding the most tears between him and Steve since their running began – knows that he has no one to blame for this but himself, that this had been his idea and Steve had done what he always did – he’d followed Danny.

 

-x-

 

They spend three years on the cargo ship, even getting married by the captain, a ceremony attended by all the crew (Asim makes himself both Danny’s maid-of-honor and Steve’s best man), before they find their way to South Africa. Steve still isn’t quite sure how it happened, but he and Danny run into Behati Pinsloo of all people and she immediately hires them on as her own private security.

Danny had tried to talk her down, told her it was all a little too high profile for them, but she can’t be swayed.

“Are we being kidnapped?” Steve asks Danny over Behati’s head, Behati herself sitting between them in the backseat of a large black SUV.

“I think so?” Danny answers, but he’s smiling – really smiling, in that way he hasn’t since they left Hawai’i and Gracie and Five-0 – and Steve finds himself smiling right back. He knows that Danny’s always happiest when he’s taking care of someone else – when they’re both helping people.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Behati says. “You don’t have to work my fashion shows – but everything else? You’ll be with me?”

Steve and Danny’s eyes meet and Steve will never not be impressed by their shared ability to have an entire conversation without ever saying a word.

“Alright,” Danny says, looking away from Steve. “But it’s not permanent. We’re free spirits now, miss.”

“I’m kinda surprised you retired at all,” Behati says, leaning over Danny to rummage about in the SUV’s refrigerator. “No offense, but you two seemed like the type to die in the line of duty.”

Danny waves his hand – always so much faster with his words than Steve is. “We did,” he says, “a couple times. We just didn’t want to wait for it to finally take.”

Behati’s head whips around and she gives Danny a hard look.

“That’s not funny,” she says.

Danny, because he will always be a father, softens his voice and says, “And we’re not laughing. Really, there were just too many close calls. We were,” Danny glances at Steve, the edges of his mouth quirking up just the slightest before he looks back down to Behati, “we were tired.”

And Behati sighs, like she understands what it is Danny’s saying. And, maybe in her own way, she did.

For the rest of the night, she doesn’t press and instead she steers the conversation to what she’d like from them (they’ll be watching her home mostly, watching out for her from the crowds, screening any threats who might show up in her mail and packages) and what she’ll pay (it goes up to five figures – “Given your experience and expertise” – before Danny begs her to please reconsider just throwing her money at them).

She asks about Gracie and all she does is smile sadly when Steve and Danny both wince and look away.

The next day just so happens to be a Thursday and, now, Steve doesn’t know much about social media, that’s Danny’s thing (to an extent) – but he knows it means something, means a lot of something, when Danny hugs Behati close, before pulling back and showing his phone to Steve.

He’s got an Instabook (maybe?) post pulled up and Steve knows enough to see that it’s something Behati posted – it’s a picture from years back, the one where he and Danny had taken Gracie to the VS Fashion Show, and it’s the three of them flanked by each of the Angels who’d walked that night. Behati herself had her arms around Gracie, the pair of them smiling wide at the camera. The picture is captioned with “#tbt to the Hawaiian Show of 2012! I just met a pair of old friends who reminded me of these good times” and it’s completed with a string of emojis of which Steve’s never quite learned the names nor meanings.

A couple hours later and Behati’s pulling them aside to let them know that Grace has messaged her to thank her and to say, if by chance Behati’s seen her Danno and her Uncle Steve, could she please let them know she loves them and misses them very much.

“She also says,” Behati continues with a small smile, “that she’ll be graduating university at the end of this semester and she’d very much like for you two to make it, even if you don’t stop by to say hi.”

Danny grins wide over at Steve, “My baby’s graduating early – how cool is that?”

“It’s cool,” Steve says, pushing his shoulder against Danny’s. With the determination that time seems to mean little to them now, Steve and Danny have made it a point to track it meticulously as far as Gracie is concerned.

They still have a month before they need to leave to start the journey back to Hawai’i, so they spend it with Behati – relaxing into the familiarity of security work, using the time to prepare and make arrangements.

 

-

 

What Steve really takes away from Gracie’s message to Behati isn’t just that she’s graduating from the University of Hawai’i early – it’s that she knew that they were alive. The emojis sent to them on their birthdays could just be something done out of grief; but asking after them _specifically_ – it made Steve’s chest ache with his adoration and love for her.

Why Gracie had decided to stay in Hawai’i, Steve—it’s not that Steve couldn’t fathom it, it’s just that he could _guess_ and each of his guesses sound ridiculous, even to himself – each guess was filled with hope.

That maybe she stayed because she liked it there. Maybe she stayed because she _loved_ it there. Maybe there were too many friends to leave behind or maybe she couldn’t bring herself to leave little Charlie or even Will Grover behind.

Maybe—.

Maybe she stayed because it’s where she knew Steve and Danny would always be able to find her.

 

-

 

They don’t go to the graduation ceremony – not even they could have disappeared into that crowd. There was just too high a risk of recognition.

Instead, they leave a large stuffed monkey inside Gracie’s car (so identified by a little bit of recon) and they watch from afar as Grace, Will Grover at her side, comes upon it and hugs the animal close, crying into its soft fur. Then they watch as Grace falls to her knees and screams, “ _Danno! Steve!_ ”

And Danny’s moving to go to her – his body acting on instinct, but Steve – and, _god_ , it hurts to be the one to do it, because he wants just as badly to go to her, too – but Steve grabs Danny and holds him in place. Because there’s people moving on the periphery – Gracie’s being watched by uniforms and they both know that Lou, wherever he is, isn’t too far away.

They flee Hawai’i after that.

(It’s easy, too, and Steve wonders at his disappointment about that.)

 

-

 

It takes another year before they run into one of their own who will stop long enough to talk to them.

She says they’re called _Immortals_. She tells them about Quickenings and the Game and the Rules, about the Gathering that was any year coming now that their numbers were climbing once more. She warned them about headhunters and young-seekers; about staying too long in once place and having too many friends. She tells that, yes, they must’ve met their first deaths in that explosion.

“What do you think?” Steve asks, once the Immortal has taken her leave.

Danny just looks at him and he says, as earnest as he can, “Whatever you want, Steve. Wherever you want to go.”

Steve wants to go back home.

He’s been aching with it since Gracie’s graduation. They could do it, he knows, there are parts of the islands they could disappear to where no one would ever find them until they were ready to be found. And he knows that if he asks, Danny would go with him. They’d be safe on the islands from the headhunters their new friend told them about.

But instead of Hawai’i, because the timing isn’t right, not yet, as much as it _hurts_ Steve to be away for so long, Steve looks at Danny and says, “I’ve never sailed the Great Lakes before.”

Danny’s smiling and he’s leaning in close, voice teasing, “You want to go back to cargo ships? Is that it? You want to put me back on a boat?”

Steve kisses Danny, featherlight and quick – once, twice – trying to distract himself.

Danny pulls back, a hand coming up to run through Steve’s hair, scratching lightly at the nape of his neck. “Alright, babe,” he says, before he’s leaning in to kiss Steve again, holding the kiss for longer.

 

-x-

 

It’s a big ship, so Steve and Danny agree it best to give the Immortal who followed them aboard as much distance as they can. And it works. Steve and Danny don’t let each other out of their sight, weathering the light teasing at being joined at the hip from their crewmates with ready smiles and easy laughter, and they avoid the other Immortal for a majority of the underway.

 

-

 

It all comes to a head with a lightning storm.

 

-

 

Danny had screamed, “I can’t take this anymore. I’m done running from him.”

Steve had followed and when they went to the deck, following that low buzz telling them where the Immortal was waiting for them, Steve said, “Get ‘im, Danno.”

 

-

 

“You need a sword if you want to fight me,” the Immortal says, his sword itself drawn and hanging loosely at his side.

Danny laughs in his face and clenches his fists and says, “I don’t think so. You see, we’re from now-times, okay? We don’t use swords.”

The Immortal furrows his eyebrows and shakes his head and he’s going to walk away, but before he can move – Danny’s on him.

Lightning flashes across the sky the second Danny snaps the Immortal’s neck, thunder cracks and booms and makes the freighter beneath his feet shake as Danny, in one smooth motion, swipes the sword from the Immortal’s grip and swings it – slicing cleanly through the Immortal’s neck with one stroke. The Immortal’s head bounces once, twice before rolling off side of the ship and into the ocean just as the sky opens up and the rain begins to fall.

Then Steve’s right behind Danny and, with a light shove, pushes the body over the side, too, Danny tossing the sword after it. They’re standing together in the rain when, _from the ocean_ , from where the Immortal’s body has just fallen, a bolt of lightning surges up.

Danny has just enough time to think, _Oh, shit, the Quickening_ , before it’s slamming into him.

 

-

 

As soon as the ship hits the next port, Chicago of all places, Steve and Danny collect their pay and jump off. The buzz of Immortals fills the air around them and they can’t get out of the city fast enough.

For three days, Danny feels like they’re being chased as he and Steve cut their way south – passing through Missouri, then Kansas, then Oklahoma – without any destination in mind. But being on the plains, surrounded by an endless flat nothing of land, all of that flyover country, it makes even Danny yearn for a coastline.

A very particular coastline.

They’re just crossing the Red River, just heading into Texas, when Danny looks over at Steve and says, “Let’s head west.”

Steve nods his head, asks, “New Mexico?”

“Further.”

“Arizona?”

“Further.”

“California?” there’s a hint of trepidation in Steve’s voice, and it’s tinged with hope.

“Steve,” Danny says, waits for Steve to glance at him – and when he does, Danny holds his gaze and says: “Further.”

 

-x-

 

They buy themselves passage on a cargo ship and the first crewman they meet gives them a doubletake before he’s throwing his arms open wide and greeting them as _Max_ and _Lou_ , saying, “Oh my god – it’s so good to see you boys again” and “Jeez, how long’s it been, huh? A few years, right?”

It takes Steve a second to recognize Asim, but as soon as he does, he and Danny both are hugging Asim back just as hard.

They settle down at a table in the mess hall and catch up – talking long into the night, omitting what they need to and exaggerating what they can get away with.

Steve ends their side of the story with a glance at Danny as he says, “And now we’re, uh,” he looks back at Asim, “we’re heading home.”

Asim shakes his head, laughing a little, “That’s some honeymoon.”

“Yeah, well, we’re some couple,” Danny says with a smirk and a pointed glance down at Asim’s jaw.

Asim laughs and leans back, rubbing at the spot where Danny had punched him all those years ago. Despite their – to put it mildly – violent introduction, Asim had become close with Steve and Danny in the months that followed (or, well, as close as they would let him). It’s easy for the three of them to pick up where they’d left off.

And like before, Asim doesn’t prod into their past – doesn’t ask what it was that had made them leave Hawai’i in the first place, why they were going back to a place where Asim and the crew had pulled Steve and Danny out of the burning wreckage of a boat – it’s a good quality in the man, the not asking, and it endears him even further to Steve and Danny.

 

-

 

When they get to Hawai’i only the moon and a few stars are out, and Steve and Danny say their goodbyes to Asim and walk away into the dark.

 

-

 

They have themselves enough cash to get a little cabin and some land that sits deep into the forests, and then they give the realtor a little bit extra to keep it all quiet when she tells Danny he looks just like that “nice detective, oh what was his name?”  

Steve has the passing thought to just kill her – but he shakes it away. He and Danny had done things in the past few years that neither of them were proud of, things that earlier versions of themselves would’ve balked at and maybe even arrested them for – but murder for something like this? Steve didn’t think they were so far gone as to see that as an acceptable option.

 

-

 

Danny is far too handy with a bow and arrow than Steve thinks is healthy for his own sanity – so he makes up for it by kissing Danny senseless. And if Steve or Danny or both of them are covered in boar’s blood when it happens, then maybe Steve kisses him just that much harder.

Danny, of course, has opinions about this. He calls Steve all kinds of names and accuses him of all kinds of things – but he does it in that way, says all of that in that tone that really just means that all Danny’s saying is one thing: _I love you_.

It’d taken a while, some time after the thing with the Sarin, some time before they’d been buried underneath a parking garage (and suffered their first death), for Steve to realize what Danny’d been saying – really saying – underneath everything else.

And after they’d left Hawai’i, Danny – he hadn’t so much as stopped talking, as he had stopped talking _as much_. Steve hadn’t noticed at first, but now that they were back home, they were re-settling back into old patterns that Steve’s sure neither of them had realized they’d fallen out of. Danny grins wide at him and talks quickly and with his hands, he presses in close and dares Steve to reciprocate.

It’s like it was when they first started working together.

It’s like they were young again.

And Steve thinks they can stay like this forever.

 

-z-

 

End.


End file.
